My Grandfather's Postcards From Lourenço Marques Never Mentioned the Elephants

The Shoebox in Alfama

My grandfather, Joaquim, died in 2003 in the flat above the bakery in Alfama where he had lived for forty years. He was not a talker. He fixed radios, he smoked one cigarette a day at exactly half past four, and he never, ever spoke about Mozambique, where he had worked as a young man on the railways out of Lourenço Marques.

When my mother finally cleared the flat, she gave me a shoebox from the top of his wardrobe. Inside were sixty one postcards, all addressed to my grandmother, all written between 1952 and 1959. The handwriting was small and careful. The pictures were of Avenida da República, the cathedral, the beach at Polana, the railway station with its green dome. The messages were mostly about the weather, the price of fish, and how much he missed her bread.

I kept that box for twenty years without really reading it. I am a tax accountant. I am fifty four. I have two grown daughters, a divorce behind me, and a habit of postponing things that might make me feel something. Last spring my younger daughter, Inês, sat on my sofa with the box on her knees and read every single card aloud. When she finished, she said, Pai, you have to go. I said I would think about it, which in our family means no. She booked the flights to Maputo herself and sent me the confirmation with no message at all.

A City With Two Names

Maputo was hotter than I expected and louder and kinder. I walked with the postcards in a plastic folder, holding each one up against the buildings like a man comparing a photograph to a suspect. The railway station was still there, the dome still green, and I stood inside it for nearly an hour while people moved around me with suitcases and sacks of rice. My grandfather had stood there. He had written to my grandmother that the clock was always four minutes slow. I checked. It was not, now. I felt oddly disappointed, as if I had come all that way for the clock.

I learned quickly that the city had grown out of the one in the cards and past it. A waiter in a café near the Baixa told me his own grandfather had also worked on the railways, on the other side of a very different history. We sat with that for a while. He did not need to explain and I did not need to apologise in words, but I understood that my family's postcards were only one version of the place.

The Thing He Never Wrote About

Here is what struck me, reading the cards in the hotel at night. In seven years, my grandfather never once mentioned an animal. Not a lion, not a bird, not a monkey. He wrote about trains and fish and loneliness. I started to wonder whether he had ever left the city at all, or whether the continent he lived on was just a rumour beyond the last station.

I had a week before the second half of the trip, the coast. On a whim, encouraged by a Dutch couple I met at breakfast, I decided to fill it with the thing he never wrote about. I flew into Botswana for a few nights in the bush. I knew nothing. I had to look up what a game drive was. I remember sitting in the airport with my phone, reading about the Okavango and the Kalahari, and searching for a Botswana safari as if I were looking for a dentist, nervous and practical at the same time.

Silence and an Elephant

The first evening, the guide stopped the vehicle beside a waterhole as the light went orange. There was an elephant drinking, an old female, her skin like dried riverbed. She lifted her trunk and turned her head towards us and simply looked. I have sat across tables from tax inspectors and from my ex wife's lawyer and I have never felt so completely assessed.

I thought about my grandfather on his railway, one cigarette a day, writing about the price of fish. I wondered if he was afraid, or homesick, or simply a man who did not think his feelings were worth the cost of a stamp. I realised that I was exactly the same. I had kept that shoebox closed for twenty years for the same reason he kept his mouth closed for forty.

That night, at the Botswana safari lodge, I did something I had never done. I took out a blank postcard I had bought in Maputo and wrote to Inês. I did not write about the weather. I wrote about the elephant, and about her great grandfather, and about how sorry I was that I had not asked him more questions while I still could. Then I wrote, I think he would have liked it here, and I am not sure that is true, but I want it to be.

The Beach at Polana, and Further

After the bush I went back to Mozambique and down the coast. My grandfather had sent eleven cards of the beach at Polana. In every one the sea was the same flat grey of old printing. In real life it was every blue I have a name for and several I do not.

I did not stay in the city for the coast. Inês had insisted I go further, somewhere quieter, and I had spent an evening in Botswana comparing Mozambique beach resorts on my phone with the same accountant's caution I bring to everything. In the end I chose a place with no particular reason except that the photographs showed a long empty beach and a few dhows, and that seemed right for a man carrying a box of letters.

I walked that beach every morning. Fishermen were pulling in nets. Children chased crabs into their holes. I read the remaining postcards there, one each day, sitting on the sand. On the last one, dated December 1959, just before he came home to Lisbon for good, my grandfather had written something I had missed every other time. Under the usual line about the bread, very small, he had added: I went out past the city on Sunday. There is much more here than I can tell you.

What I Carried Home

So he did go. He just never found a way to say it. Perhaps that is the most Portuguese thing about him, or the most male, or simply the most human.

I came home with sand in the shoebox and one new postcard inside it, the one I wrote in Botswana. Inês has it on her fridge now, with a magnet shaped like a sardine. She says I should write more of them. I said I would think about it.

This time, in our family, that means yes.